The Second Law of Thermodynamics
by TheEdwardz
Summary: Kyubey reflects on the universe and explains the circumstances behind the events of the original timeline. Some science stuff.
1. Chapter 1

THE UNIVERSE IS DYING. As spacetime expands, the void in between galaxies grows ever larger, ever emptier. If it all doesn't end in a bang, then it'll end in a whimper. Slowly but surely, atoms will separate from each other and find their way back to their simplest states of being. Fueled by the inexorable progression of time, entropy will increase until all matter and energy fill the great expanse in a thin, uniform soup. This is the fate we are condemned to according to the second law of thermodynamics.

The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy in a closed system will increase as time advances until it reaches a maximum value. You may ask: what is entropy? I'll explain. Imagine a deck of playing cards. Suppose that the ace of spades and the ace of hearts represent atoms, and every other card represents empty space. If the two aces are next to each other, then they are ordered. Now imagine that with every tick of an arbitrary clock, we shuffle the deck once. You can see that as time moves forward, the two aces will separate from each other, and disorder increases. Sure, the possibility of the two aces reuniting at some point in the future is substantial, but the probability of them being apart is just so much larger. Extend this example to our universe. Instead of two atoms, there are a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion billion of them. And instead of there being 50 cards of empty space, there's (for our purposes) an infinite number of them. With every step through time, the universe shuffles itself, and disorder naturally increases. There's no real propelling force behind entropy; it's just a consequence of probability.

Of course, it's possible to reverse entropy via the input of work. You humans do this all the time. All you really are are just bags of water and organic matter trying your hardest to avoid succumbing to chemical equilibrium with the environment. But what's special about humans compared to other forms of life is that you're able to produce energy that we can harvest in the form of emotion. Human emotion is quite the enigma. It's also quite the contradiction. On one hand, your emotions are the key to preserving the universe, but on the other hand, it's those same precious emotions that cloud your judgment. Why can't you see that by sacrificing your individual souls, you can better the lives of those who will come after you? When it comes to engineering, medicine, and technology, you're happy to use rationality and reason to pursue these endeavors. But when it comes to life – the most important endeavor – you rely on emotion. How quaint!

CHARLOTTE HAD BEEN A PUELLA MAGI from a long lineage of Puella Magi that I had contracted. She was a plump girl with short, black hair and a disarming smile. She had an infatuation with sweets and cheeses and a knack for singing. She was the star of the choir at her local church, and when it came to solos, she never disappointed. I first detected her strength in September of 2005. It was during a recital at the city dance hall in downtown Mitakihara. The mayor and a bunch of other bigwigs attended the event as a fundraiser for kids with cancer who could not afford treatment. Over a thousand people showed up and only five hundred could fit in the theater. After a few words of welcome from the mayor, the show began. The curtains parted, the ballerinas moved, and Charlotte opened her mouth.

Her voice! Oh, her voice! I thought my ears were fooling me at first. Then I thought that she had already been claimed by another one of me and that her wish was to possess the voice of an angel. She sang streams of silver. I felt these waves of energy emanate from her body. She poured her soul into those lyrics, and as I listened to her, I got a taste of just how powerful a Puella Magi she could be. I wasted no time approaching her and offering to make her a Puella Magi, but she refused. She came from a rich family and had everything she could possibly want. By age 12, she already owned a pony, the entire line of American Barbie dolls, and most importantly, she could eat whatever dessert or cheese she desired. Cakes, pies, cookies, pastries, cottage cheese, bleu cheese, you name it, she ate it. She was popular at school, she was at the top of her grade, her body was healthy, and she was modest. I couldn't possibly wish for anything, she told me. A true angel, I tell you. I could almost see the halo dangling above her head.

But I couldn't just let this opportunity pass by. That night, I visited little Charlotte in her room. She was sleeping, so I didn't have any trouble pulling a Grief Seed from my body and planting it beneath her bed. With any luck, the Grief Seed would absorb her negative emotions and eventually revive the witch within it.

Charlotte continued to thrive. For a year, she lived the life that many dream of but few experience. On Wednesdays and Fridays, she led the science club at her school. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, she participated in the school choir. On weekends, she sung for the church choir and was recognized nationally for her talent. And all the while, she kept on eating her desserts.

She applied to Mitakihara Middle School and gained admission. Not long after her first day of school, she came down with a terrible fever. No longer did she resemble the angel that she once was. Her once ruddy cheeks were now pale and stiff. Painful lumps sprouted on her neck and stomach. The doctors performed a blood test and revealed the tragic circumstances to her parents: Charlotte had leukemia. Her bones were producing white blood cells at a hasty rate, and without proper quality control, the cells were immature and could not function as proper protectors of her body. Pathogens could gain free entry into her body and destroy her as they pleased. Her parents were crestfallen. They placed her on an intensive regimen of daily chemotherapy followed by administration of a cocktail of anti-tumor agents. She was placed on a restricted diet. Fruits and vegetables, meats and protein, grain products; they were all fine. But she was not allowed to eat sweets or cheese, the two things she had loved so much. She snuck out of her bed a few times to ask for a slice of apple pie at the hospital's cafeteria, but the orderlies recognized her and sent her back to her room. After that, they kept the door locked.

She was resolute at first, but as months passed by, she grew increasingly hopeless. The cancer was killing her. Her jet black hair had fallen out, and she could barely talk let alone sing. All the while, she craved sweets and cheeses and lost her appetite for anything else. Her arms thinned out to the bones, and her eyes fell ashen.

By February, Charlotte looked like a skeleton dipped in wax. I knew that then was the best time to visit her. One night, I made my way to the medical center and perched on the windowsill to her room. On the stand beside her bed, _The Very Hungry Caterpillar _sat half-open.

"Psst!"

Charlotte slowly pulled open her eyelids. "You…."

"You're not looking so good. What happened?"

"Th-the doctors tell me it's acute leukemia. They have no idea how I came down with such a sudden case of it."

"Do you think you'll recover?"

"Neither the doctors nor my parents want to talk about it. They tell me to be strong. I figure that that means I probably won't make it."

"That's terrible! But I can help! You just have to make a contract with me."

She sat up in her bed and rubbed her eyes. Her movements were pained and sluggish. "I don't suppose I have any other choice."

"Just tell me your wish, and you'll be on your way."

"I…I just want to taste the sugar in my mouth again. I want to be able to eat as many desserts as I want."

"Ah! That can be done!"

The doctors later called it a miracle. They'd never seen anything like it. Charlotte had gone from the end stage of leukemia and made a full recovery. The red glow returned to her cheeks, and she regained her voice. Within a week, she was back in school and of course, savoring the taste of cake in her mouth. In her desperation, she forgot to add that she wanted to be able to eat cheese as well, but hey, what can I do? I'm just the messenger.

As a Puella Magi, Charlotte was the strongest one I had formed a contract with until I met you. You should have seen her. Her Soul Gem was an emerald that shone with the light of a million emotions. She had an unbelievable amount of talent, and as her skills were tempered by experience, she matured into an unstoppable fighter. Witches flinched at just the mention of her name, and other Puella Magi even paid tribute to her by bringing her cheese. Of course, she retained her love for sweets and never forgot to gobble down a dessert after every battle.

If you must know, she died battling the Walpurgis Night. The circumstances were similar to when you fought Walpurgis Night, except she didn't have any help. She held her own for a while, but the witch was just too strong. There's nothing more to it than that. She ran her course and as expected, became one of the strongest witches after her Soul Gem crumbled into a Grief Seed. All things said and done, she provided enough emotion for me to meet my quota for the next ten years! With her sacrifice, the universe was extended by 100 trillion years.

LIFE REQUIRES A SOURCE OF ENERGY. Energy can be used to do work, and work can reliably prevent local increases in entropy. In the case of Earth, your sun is that source of energy. It's just one big Soul Gem if you think about it. It throws its energy-rich rays at the Earth, and a small part of that energy gets used by plants and plankton. Those plants and plankton beget herbivores, and the herbivores beget carnivores. At the top of the pyramid lie human beings in all your biological glory. And for four and a half billion years, the sun steadily nourished the Earth with its heat drawn from the furnaces of nuclear fusion. Fueled by this energy, the forces of evolution combated the rise in entropy and over eons, prokaryotes evolved into eukaryotes, eukaryotes evolved into simple fish, simple fish evolved into tetrapods, tetrapods evolved into primates, and primates evolved into humans. This great chain of being remained unbroken for billions and billions of years, each organism passing on its genetic material onto its progeny until you, Madoka, were finally brought into this world. And all the while, the second law of thermodynamics chipped away at the very foundations of life. Every time a bacteria synthesized a protein, every time a cell replicated, entropy increased. That was okay though, because the sun continued to provide your planet will all the energy it ever needed to sustain itself.

You may not live to see it, but one day, your sun will run out of fuel and stop burning. From that point onward, entropy will inevitably rise. After an inordinate amount of time, every star will burn out, and the universe will homogenize. Once all of matter is evenly distributed across the universe, then entropy will cease to rise. That's because in this scenario, entropy is already at its maximum value, and the universe is in complete thermal equilibrium. No useful work can be done now, and life cannot possibly exist in such a thermodynamic hell. This is known as the heat death of the universe.

MITAKIHARA MIDDLE SCHOOL was the jewel of the Japanese school system. The 48,000 square meter campus consisted of six academic buildings, one administrative building, one health facility, and a state-of-the-art gym. Graduates regularly attended prestigious high schools and universities. The average score for a Mitakihara graduate on the college entrance examination is 301 (out of 400) compared to the national average of 234. The student-to-faculty ratio was the lowest of any middle school in the nation. Gaining admission to Mitakihara Middle School required scoring in the upper decile of the school's entrance exam, which covered all the subjects on the national college entrance exam. This is what Homura Akemi had read in the brochure that her parents brought her earlier today.

Homura folded up the brochure and placed it on the stand beside her hospital bed. She stretched, yawned, and looked outside. From the fourth floor of Mitakihara Medical Center, she could see for several miles out. Cars flowed on the streets like blood cells and eventually disappeared in the horizon where a row of apartment complexes stood. To the side of the road lay two baseball diamonds and four soccer fields. Children and adults alike routinely convened there to run, catch, kick, and sweat. Sports really did seem like fun.

The soft beep of the heart monitor next to the bed reminded her of her curse. She had been born with a disorder known as valvular heart disease. Normally, when your heart beats, valves open and close to prevent the backflow of blood. Homura's valves were damaged, so her heart was inefficient. If you place a stethoscope against the chest of a person with this disease, you can hear a distinct murmur that you wouldn't otherwise hear from a healthy patient. Because of her condition, Homura was confined to a bed and allowed only one daily half-hour walk around the hospital. If she performed any physical activity at all, her heart would scream and thrash. It would feel like there was a fireball in her chest.

Her well-to-do parents had paid for artificial heart valves to be implanted. When Homura heard that this would require opening up her chest, paralyzing her body, and cutting through cardiac tissue, her heart raced. The pain from that was unbearable, so she was forced to be brave. Her parents told her not to worry. These doctors were the best in the world.

She was to sit for the entrance exam at Mitakihara Middle School tomorrow. Her caretakers made an exception for her, but only this once. Since she was confined to a bed, she couldn't go to the mall or eat at a restaurant or visit the park like other girls her age did. She could only study and read books. Her parents had hired a cadre of tutors to provide her with a first class education from the bedside. They quickly discovered that despite all the physical handicaps that ailed her, she was blessed with a good mind. She gobbled up academic material and excelled in every subject that was presented to her. Her parents were pleased. The next day, she traveled to the testing center with the help of an aide and took the exam. She blazed through the English and history sections and had a bit or trouble on the math and science sections. A few guesses here and there, but nothing too serious. She was done a half-hour before time ran out and had the luxury of triple checking all of her answers while the rest of the students scribbled madly to finish. Scores would be out in a few days.

The next night, Homura underwent the operation. She didn't remember much besides the euphoria right before she went under. Men in procedure masks loomed above her all blurry and distorted. They carried scalpels and scissors and told her to relax. The monitors behind her made beeps and boops. She drifted into slumber even as the doctors shone a powerful light. It'll all be over in a second, they assured her.

When she opened her eyes, she was met with an endless expanse of black space. She looked around but could not find anything other than isotropic nothingness. Suddenly, a wall of fluorescence appeared above her and plunged down, slamming her into a ground that she hadn't noticed before. The darkness filled up with vibrant colors and strange shapes. They pulsated in steady beats and then slowed down to a halt. Blocks of brick thrust up and encased her in a tiny dome. Streams of red liquid seeped in from the cracks and then congealed into an amorphous blob. Two claws took shape and then two four legs and a head. The monster hissed and brandished its pincers. Homura screamed.

From above, a bolt of energy pierced the brick and blasted off one of the monster's legs. It stumbled backward and howled in pain. Homura looked up and spotted a shadowy figure perched by the edge of a hole in the dome. The figure's outline revealed a large dress and ribbons tied to each side of her hair. A pink oval glowed from her neck. She drew back a bow she carried, and another bolt of energy descended and struck the monster in its torso. Homura watched as it let out a final death cry and then shattered into shards of negative space.

"Wh-Who are you!" Homura called out to her savior, but she was already gone.

The colors around her turned into a hundred shades of red. They began to swirl in one great bloody vortex. Homura hugged herself to keep from quivering. From outside, a string of words exploded past the brick dome and rattled her eardrums.

_Oh no. We're losing her. _

The voice sounded familiar, but she couldn't tell for sure. The walls began to crumble.

_Her heart's coming back too soon! We need some saline solution stat!_

The whirlpool of red around her pulsed in booming thumps. She fell to her knees and clutched her chest. It felt like it was going to burst. Slowly, slowly, the vortex stopped spinning, and the red desaturated into gray, then the gray darkened into black. Homura hung in weightless silence once again. It was like being trapped in a sensory deprivation chamber.

In the operating room, the doctors scrambled to keep Homura alive. The ice around her heart melted too quickly, and it began to beat in the middle of a critical incision. The scalpel accidentally sheared through a delicate mass of cardiac tissue, and now the proposition that Homura may not wake up went from possible to probable. Her parents, who were watching from above, held their breaths. The surgeons' yelling and harried movements flustered her fragile mother. She turned red and cried. The husband and wife held each other and prayed for a miracle.

A MAN STANDS IN FRONT of a video camera with a tennis ball in his hand at chest height. The recording begins, and the man releases the ball. It accelerates toward the ground and hits it with a soft _bop_. The ball bounces off the ground and rises back into the man's hand. Now, take the footage and run it in reverse. If the conditions are right, the reversed clip will look the same as the forward clip. In other words, the laws of physics are time symmetrical; they are viable regardless of whether you run time forwards or backwards. Gravity is the same, momentum is the same, electromagnetism is the same, and so on. But there is one _big _difference between the two clips. In the forward clip, the ball reaches a lower maximum height after its bounce. This is because on its way down, the tennis ball loses energy to air resistance, to the ground when it bounces, and then more to air resistance on its way up. The ball can never gain this energy back. It cannot convert random vibrational energy (in other words, temperature) back into ordered kinetic energy (in other words, velocity). This would be a violation of the pesky second law of thermodynamics. See how annoying this can be?

If you observe chemical reactions on a nanoscopic scale, you wouldn't be able to tell which way time was flowing; everything looks feasible either way. But if you zoom out and study systems on a macroscopic scale, you'll see that disorder inevitably increases. A cloud of ink in water can never coalesce back into the original drop. It's fated to dissipate. You may get a few localized buildups of order here and there, but none serious enough to be labeled a violation of the second law. Because entropy reliably increases as time progresses, the arrow of time is a thermodynamic one. If we can reverse entropy, we can in effect, reverse time. Isn't that exciting?


	2. Chapter 2

MAMI TOMOE DIDN'T want to visit the grandparents' graves. Her mother only told her yesterday that they would be making the trip, and Mami felt cheated. She'd never even met her grandparents. They died before she was born and never saw her, so why did she have to go see them? To pay respects, said her mother. Mami clenched her fist and frowned to that response. She had planned to watch her favorite Saturday TV show at noon, but that wouldn't be happening. The graveyard was almost two hundred kilometers away from Mitakihara Town, and the round trip would take at least four hours. She hated long car rides, and she detested the smell of the car's leather seats. It made her nauseous. On a trip that long, she would throw up for sure.

"I don't want to go!" she yelled.

"You don't have a choice. You're going whether you like it or not," said her mother.

"I'm. Not. Going!"

Her mother slapped her. Mami's head jerked to the side. She lifted a hand to rub the red patch that formed on her cheek. Words perished in her throat. Tears welled in her eyes.

"I'm going to wait in the car with your father," said her mother. "If you're not there in five minutes, you're going to be in a world of trouble when we get back."

She picked up her purse and left for the white Honda parked out in front of the house. Its engine purred in awkward anticipation.

Mami stood stunned in the middle of the living room. Part of her wanted to stay in the room and sulk in her own despair. That was emotion. She was angry at her grandparents for dying so soon, she was angry at her mother for slapping her, but she was mostly angry at herself for being so selfish. The other part urged her to go visit the graveyard because it knew her mother was right. That was rationality. If she stayed, her mother would come back and ground her after screaming at her for half an hour. If she went, she would return to her mother's good graces and avoid punishment. The trip would be bad but not too bad. She might throw up once or twice, but at least she wouldn't have to deal with her mother. Mami dried her tears with a tissue and sighed. She reluctantly slipped into her jacket and headed for the car.

It was not even breakfast time, so the highway was clear. On the way, her mother apologized for slapping her and promised to go watch a movie with her later. Mami did not throw up once on the 90 minute journey probably because she hadn't eaten anything beforehand.

They visited the graves and left a bottle of wine and a bowl of rice at the foot of the tombstone. According to her mother, grandpa loved to drink, and grandma loved to cook. After a few words and tearful "I miss you"s, they had a filling breakfast.

They left the graveyard at five past ten and would hopefully make it back by noon. Maybe Mami would catch her TV show after all. The white Honda cruised on the highway in undisturbed silence and after a while, her mother spoke up.

"It's too quiet. How about a joke?"

"Sure," said Mami.

"This is an American joke. Here it goes: Why did the chicken cross the road?"

Mami pondered the question for a moment. "I don't know," she said. "Why?"

"To get to the other side," answered her mother. Mami waited for the real punchline, but it didn't come.

"What? I don't get it."

"Well," started her mother, "I think 'the other side' is supposed to be a metaphor for death. So when the chicken gets to the other side, that means he's dead. The chicken was suicidal."

"That's really morbid," said Mami's father. "How about I tell a better one instead?"

"Go ahead, Mr. Comedian," said her mother.

"Alright, what did the bartender say to-"

"LOOK OUT!"

Mami's father snapped the wheel to the right and narrowly avoided colliding into the car in front of him. The white Honda lurched diagonally from the carpool lane and landed in the two neighboring lanes of traffic. An oncoming sedan behind them slammed on its brakes and skidded to a heavy thud into the back side door where Mami was sitting. The three passengers bucked in their seats. From behind, a two-and-a-half-ton lorry from the adjacent lane barreled towards the front of the car. The truck driver crushed the brakes at the last second, and a terrible shriek emitted from the wheels. Mami looked out her window. She saw the three red diamonds of the Mitsubishi logo that was welded on the grill grow larger and larger. The heady smell of gasoline and burning rubber filled her nostrils. Two and a half tons of steel slammed into the shotgun side, and the front part of the car crumpled like a paper bag. The Honda screeched against the asphalt and rolled over twice, casting loose parts into the air, before it landed supine on the pavement.

Mami lay there. Her cheeks stung. They had been lacerated by the window glass. A terrible ache pulsed at her side. She commanded her hand to move, but it refused to obey. Beyond the wreckage, people shouted this and that into their cell phones. _Please help. We have a car crash here_. Mami squirmed. Her back felt wet and warm; she had lost a lot of blood. Through the slits in her eyelids, she saw the mangled bodies of her parents in the front seats. Their mouths hung open. Jags of bone punctured through their skin. She was alone.

Looking up through the right side window, she saw a smiling, blue sky frothing about with clouds. A column of light fell through the opening and landed on her body. The sun felt good on her cheeks.

I leapt up over the door and perched on the window. A pool of red had formed beneath her. She ran her eyes over my being and convinced herself that I must be God. She extended her arm to touch me, but she was too far away. I could tell her vision was getting swimmy; she was going to black out.

"Mami Tomoe, right?" I said cheerfully. She grunted.

"You don't have to say anything. Just listen. My name is Kyubey, and I'm here to make you an offer. You're losing a lot of blood, and you're going to go into hypovolemic shock soon. If the doctors don't come soon, you'll most likely die. But I can help! If you make a contract with me to become a Puella Magi, I'll grant any wish you desire. You can use that wish to save yourself and then help me fight evil. It's a two-in-one package. Just say the word!"

Mami inhaled for one last sentence. The breath gurgled through the blood in her lungs as she pleaded, "I…I…I don't want to die alone!"

JAMES CLERK MAXWELL was a brilliant Scottish physicist from the 19th century. He presented four fundamental equations that described electromagnetism and was a gifted theorist. In 1867, he came up with a cute theory that postulated a violation of the second law of thermodynamics. Gases, as you know, are composed of particles that bounce around freely. The difference between a hot and cold gas is that the particles in the hot gas move faster on average than the particles in the cold gas. Remember that temperature is only a measurement of the _average_ speed of the particles in the gas. That means that there are lots of fast-moving particles in the cold gas and lots of slow-moving particles in the hot gas. Now, imagine two chambers, one full of hot gas and one full of cold gas. The two chambers are connected by a single door that's guarded by an entity known as Maxwell's demon. Every time a slow-moving particle in the hot chamber approaches the door, the cute little demon opens it up and allows that particle to transfer into the cold chamber. Conversely, when a fast-moving particle in the cold chamber approaches the door, the demon allows it to flow into the hot chamber. If Maxwell's demon were absent, the second law of thermodynamics predicts that the two chambers would meet at a middle temperature. With Maxwell's demon guarding the door however, heat actually flows from the cold chamber to the hot chamber. A reversal of entropy!

I have been called Maxwell's demon before because my goal is to decrease disorder. I don't particularly like the label, but it's not inaccurate. The word "demon" carries with it negative connotations. I don't see it that way; I see "demon" as simply meaning a supernatural being, which I am. The "Maxwell's" is interesting. The "s" at the end of "Maxwell's" implies possessiveness as in: The demon is the property of Maxwell. I cannot lie and tell you that I am owned by a Scottish physicist, even as a bad joke. But I _can_ tell you that I am only a messenger, and that there are entities above even myself. If you wish to call these entities "Maxwell", then go right ahead. It won't hurt their feelings, I promise. Harvesting emotions is my job, and I have a quota to meet. Both my employer and I agree that sacrificing humans for this purpose will help others more than it hurts them. We worked out this cost-benefit analysis a long, long time ago.

I MET YOU JUST as spring ended, which was about a month after I met Mami. You were a naïve pink-haired girl with a tiny smile and a prodigious pulse. I first detected your presence just as winter ended. Up until then, Charlotte was the strongest Puella Magi I contracted, but your potential was magnitudes above hers. I thought it was some kind of error; it felt like a billion Puella Magi held up their Soul Gems against each other and let them throb in unison. I had to have you.

I remember when I first spoke to you. The night was cool and soaked with the dim light of streetlamps. The sky watched me as I snuck into your bedroom and roosted on the shelf above your bed where a menagerie of stuffed animals rested.

"Wake up! Wake up!" I called.

You rose from your shallow slumber and rubbed your eyes, groggy, grumbling, and tired all over. "Look up!"

You tilted your head back and spotted what was to you, a cute, misshaped cat. I saw all of you at that moment. Your thoughts, your past, your future. Everything came to me in a colorful panorama of fluid images. In those images, I saw you transform into a witch as black as fate and destroy the planet. I sensed the despair in you when you realized that I had "tricked" you into accepting the contract in the first place. I gazed into your tearful eyes and celebrated your sacrifice to the universe. Your life up to that point had been normal. Five days out of seven, you rose early and attended went to Mitakihara Middle School. You participated in sports and acted as the health representative in your class. By all standards, you were an ordinary teenage girl.

"Madoka Kaname, right?"

"H-How do you know my name?"

"I have something to ask you: Please make a contract with me."

You shot me a perplexed look and asked me what a contract was. I explained. Your eyes beamed like jewels when I told you about being a Puella Magi, and you said you'd think about it. I smiled. It was only a matter of time. Deep down, I wanted to thank you for agreeing to make the sacrifice, but I knew that that would interfere with your decision.

The next day after class, you encountered your first witch. You were in the school courtyard when it happened. A chilled breeze brushed across your body, and in the blink of an eye, you found yourself in the middle of a lurid landscape. The ground had twisted itself into an ugly pattern. Ribbons of bright color incised the air like scissors and felled buildings like paper trees. What used to be the sky was now a crisscrossing mesh of impossible geometry. Out of the mottled confusion, an ugly behemoth with a hundred eyes and a hundred arms writhed forth at you with the momentum of a mountain. The monster's screams were deafening. It was as surreal as it was unreal. Your knees buckled under your anxiety, and you began to sob.

Then a ball of fire descended upon the witch and burned off a good part of his body. Mami Tomoe had finally arrived.

"What…," you squeaked.

"That was really dangerous, but you're safe now," said Mami as she dropped in from above.

You were entranced. And why wouldn't you be? Mami showed no sign that she had been involved in a car crash. She was elegant and buxom. Her golden hair dressed her head like a crown. Her pigtails spiraled down like streamers, and she had a confident aura about her. The smile on her lips did not waver, and you wondered if it even could. To you, she looked like a fairy tale princess that you would never be allowed to touch.

"Based on your uniform, I assume you're from Mitakihara," she said. "Are you a second year student?"

"And you are…?"

"Ah, I must introduce myself," she said. The witch bellowed and then opened its arms to expose a thousand more eyes. The dizzying background changed from red to green to blue. "But first…."

Mami pitched her Soul Gem in the air, and a wave of white light engulfed her. A glistening pair of stockings wrapped themselves around her legs; her uniform swelled and shifted in a tempestuous frenzy; a small cap that came from nowhere landed on her head. You just stared as fourteen years of worldly experiences shattered in an instant. She lifted her hand in a solemn decree, and a thousand silver muskets appeared behind her, their barrels pointed at the monster. Her arm swung down, and a thousand bullets issued at once. The witch was no match for her.

"Amazing," you managed, once the smoke cleared.

The landscape returned to reality, and you found yourself back in the school courtyard.

"Thanks for saving us, Mami," I said.

"I was just passing by," she replied.

I turned to you. "So how about it, Madoka? Let's form a contract and you can be a Puella Magi too!"

You hesitated for a moment and turned to Mami. She offered you a reassuring smile.

"Let me think about it."

EVERY SECOND THAT ROLLS BY marks another step towards our collective demise. I have told you again and again that my job is to prevent that demise and rejuvenate the universe. You tell me that I'm evil, yet I cannot think of anything less evil than preserving life. I concede that lives must be sacrificed in the first place, but such is the way of nature. For example, an oil company must invest in a drilling rig so that it can reach the energy-laden petroleum beneath the ground. After all, isn't it a popular human saying that you must spend money to make money? And let's not forget the millions of animals you slaughter each day for the sake of feeding your bloated population. But the moment that I do the same thing to you, you call me evil. Well what do you think goes through the minds of the helpless cows and swine in the slaughterhouses as they're hung upside down and then slit across the neck? These principles are all the same. The only difference is that reversing entropy occurs on a much grander platform. No, I am not evil. One day you humans will evolve the mental facilities to suppress emotion, and you will realize that I was only trying to help. It's a tragedy to watch. You _Homo sapiens_ really are selfish. At least I'm not a hypocrite. My species will eventually all sacrifice themselves for the sake of reversing entropy. Why can't you do the same?


	3. Chapter 3

BEFORE YOU AND MAMI PARTED, she asked you if you wanted to join her on a witch hunt tomorrow.

"You can see what fighting a witch is really about," she said. "Then you can decide if you want to become a Puella Magi."

"It'll be a great experience," I added as I hopped onto your shoulder.

"Well… okay," you said.

"See you tomorrow after school then," said Mami. With that, she left.

Now was about the time of day when people weren't sure whether to say "good afternoon" or "good evening". The sun was half over the horizon, and the sky blushed a fiery red-orange. You carried me back to your room and placed me on the shelf with your stuffed animals. I waited there as you ate dinner downstairs and watched some TV. As I studied your room, I was reminded of our desperate situation. The fancy cherry wood chairs, the stuffed pig in the corner of your bed, the heart-patterned blanket, all of this was disintegrating one atom at a time. The entropy built up, up, up like a silence that had fermented in my ears for so long that it began to scream. You finally returned to your room at ten past ten, ready to go to sleep.

"So what do you think?" I asked. "Don't you want to be a Puella Magi? Didn't Mami look really cool?"

"She did," you said.

"Don't you want to be like her?"

"I do. I think I'll make a contract with you, Kyubey, but only after tomorrow's witch hunt."

"Great! Do you know what your wish will be?"

You paused for a beat to think. "Well, I'd really just like a true friend who I can trust to look out for me."

"Really? You seem like an amiable person, Madoka. What about that teal-haired girl you were talking to earlier today?"

"Oh, her name is Sayaka Miki. She's best friends with Hitomi Shizuki. I've only talked to them a few times but only as a classmate."

"Well, what about Mami?"

"She's too cool for me, Kyubey. I was thinking about someone who I can really connect to. Someone who will look out for me no matter what."

I thought about your words for a moment. This wish wasn't unreasonable, it wasn't even surprising, yet it sounded odd coming from a person like you, Madoka. I've heard the wishes of hundreds and hundreds of girls. One of them once asked me to be transported into the past. Strange, but I granted it. Another one asked me if she could meet aliens on another planet. I granted that one too. But of all the wishes I've heard, yours, for some reason, made me the most nervous.

"Is that all?" I asked.

"Mmmhmm. I've got to go to sleep now. I've got cleaning duty tomorrow, and I need all of my energy for that."

"Good night then, Madoka."

"Good night, Kyubey."

The next day, you waited with me in the courtyard after school for Mami like you said you would. You were cheery and spry, much unlike the weather that afternoon. It had been drizzling all morning, and it refused to let up. The raindrops pattered on your umbrella as you waited and fantasized about being a Puella Magi. A few minutes later, Mami arrived, and you greeted her with all of the enthusiasm of a new recruit. She showed you her golden Soul Gem, and it began to pulsate in a steady rhythm. You two followed the Soul Gem's signal like a transponder and ended up at an old business center a mile from Mitakihara Middle School. The building itself was abandoned and dilapidated. Vines of ivy slithered out from missing windows and wrapped the outer walls in their grip. Streams of yellow tape that read "DO NOT CROSS" were stretched across what used to be the oft-entrance to a prestigious company headquarters.

"It's here," said Mami.

"Look up!"

From the roof, a tiny figure leaned forward from the ledge and consigned its body to freefall. A powerful updraft pushed a long wave of hair into the air. It was a woman.

Mami lunged forward and transformed instantly into her magical form as she had yesterday. She swung her hand, and a net of glowing, yellow bands materialized beneath the woman and caught her in its fibers. The net lowered her to the ground, and Mami inspected the unconscious woman. A strange, crimson emblem was branded onto her neck. The wind howled, and the rain grew fiercer.

"A witch's kiss," observed Mami. "Let's go."

You carried me with you into the building and past the cracked walls. A damp smell permeated the dark corridors. Bales of rotting paper covered the floor as if to bandage it. Water dripped from three places in the ceiling.

"Be careful," said Mami. "We're past the barrier now."

"Huh….?"

The hallway began to shift into something unholy. The sheets of peeled wallpaper warped and wobbled until they had been distorted into a bright spread of abstract expressionism. After a moment, the hues crystallized into patterns. Chunks of pudding and cake swelled up and tiled the sky. Giant donuts and cupcakes sprouted from the frosting that was once a linoleum floor. Strudels, custards, tiramisus, every imaginable type of dessert filled the space until everything looked sweet enough to eat. The ground quaked.

"Watch out!" you warned.

Above, a colorful half-ghost half-puppet ripped through a sugar-coated Danish and bore herself to Mami. Its eyes were empty. So, this is what Charlotte had become!

"Careful, Mami. That's Charlotte, the dessert witch."

"Will do!"

Mami drew a musket from inside her body. Her Soul Gem flashed, and the gun blew up to a hundred times its size. With effortless motions, she aimed the oversized rifle at Charlotte and pulled the trigger. "Tiro Finale!"

The shot pierced the witch's body, and it deflated into a heap of rags. No sooner had you begun to celebrate than another grotesque monster climb out from an opening in the rags. It possessed a caterpillar's body and a clown's face. Its eyes spun deliriously like a kaleidoscope. Its black skin was spangled with red dots. The monster thrashed about and crushed a line of cream puffs that sat beneath it. Mami stood stunned as it sprang toward her, its nose not two feet from hers. The monster pulled open its jaws, ready to engulf the golden-haired treat. A look of horror set on Mami's face. I turned to you.

"Madoka! Quick! You have to save Mami!"

"What? I…."

"Make a contract with me! Tell me your wish that will power your Soul Gem!"

"O-Okay. I wish for true friendship!"

Let it be so.

You felt a sudden tightening in your muscles. A flash of energy erupted from within you. Your school uniform dissolved into a flowing dress. Your stockings frilled out, and a flawless ruby nestled itself on your newly formed choker. You swung your arms and found the slender bow that materialized at your service. The texture and weight of the wooden arch felt familiar in your hands. You drew back the string, and with one mighty release, a bolt of pink energy burst from the bow. The arrow struck the monster between the eyes; it recoiled and shrieked so loudly that the manifolds spacetime itself seemed to crumble. No matter. You ignored it and released another arrow, then another, then another. A salvo of pink bolts penetrated Charlotte's elongated body. Your arms moved themselves as if they'd been trained for years to do this. You were a natural Puella Magi. The monster shrank and let out a final shriek as it imploded into nothingness. Goodbye, Charlotte.

"Amazing!" you exclaimed.

"_You_ were amazing!" I said.

"Madoka," said Mami as she ran up and wrapped herself around you, "You saved my life! Thank you! Thank you!"

The mountains of frosting began to thaw, the pies and cakes vaporized, and the bitter weight of reality returned.

A few miles away at Mitakihara Medical Center, Homura Akemi woke from her coma.

LUDWIG EDUARD BOLTZMANN was an Austrian physicist and Maxwell's contemporary. It was he who laid the foundations of the second law of thermodynamics on your planet. Boltzmann was a brilliant man who was underappreciated in his lifetime, but came to be known as the "Father of Statistical Mechanics". In addition to his work in particle distributions and entropy, he also came up with an intriguing idea known as the Boltzmann brain. He asked: what if the universe had existed forever, and that it had reached thermal equilibrium a long, long time ago? What if these trillions and trillions of atoms floated around in a probabilistically uniform distribution across all of spacetime for an unimaginably long time, and then they all suddenly condensed? Remember: entropy is only a consequence of probability. Stochastic dips in disorder happen all the time. There is no driving force behind entropy other than random chance. It follows then, that given an infinite amount of time, at some point, all matter in existence will come together in one great plunge in entropy and create a universe capable of sustaining life. We may just happen to exist during one of these "Boltzmann brains". If we didn't exist, we wouldn't be able to observe it. This is another principle called the anthropic principle.

It's an interesting theory, right? Too bad it's wrong. Our species struggled with this question many eons ago, and we came up with a definitive answer not long afterward. We won't bother explaining this to you. Not even the preeminent physicists of your time would understand let alone you. Just know that the universe has a finite age and an impending expiration date. By the time I've finished telling this to you this, entropy will have increased by enough to obliterate an adult star.

AND SO IT GOES that things didn't end up the way I had originally planned. Homura was a shoo-in for Mitakihara Middle School; she scored the highest on the entrance exam out of all the students who took it that year. She joined your class, and you two became an inseparable item. A few weeks later, Walpurgis Night finally showed up and killed Mami. You battled the big bad witch and triumphed, you did what Charlotte could not do, but you were mortally wounded in the process. Homura consoled you as your lungs puffed out one last breath and your eyes hollowed out. You lay half-immersed in the water among the ruins of a city that time had forgotten about. It began to rain as it had when you and Mami met Charlotte, except this time, the skies were lit. A warm sunshower.

Your wish came true, Madoka. Homura relinquished her soul to me to save you. And her wish was this: to meet with you once more, but this time, instead of you protecting her, she would protect you. I heard an unbreakable conviction in her voice, and it reminded me of Charlotte when she sung at the dance recital. Bound to the contract, I granted her her wish. A sharp pain radiated from her core. She clutched her chest and scrunched her face. A gleaming purple gem slowly pulled itself free from her bosom.

"The contract is formed," I announced. "Your wish has lowered the entropy in the universe. Now let your powers loose!"

Homura glanced up at the shining stone and then clapped it between her hands. The rain fell on her face and merged with the tears that streamed from her eyes. Then, in a blinding flash of purple light, she vanished.

"Goodbye, Homura!" I called.

She had ripped apart the very fabric of spacetime. I could sense the ripples of time dilation flow by as she shuttled into the past. I surmised that she would probably wake up in the hospital several days before her meeting with you. How would she alter the past? What effect will this effect have on the future? I suppose we're just going to have to wait and see, eh?

The drizzle continued to fall. Heaps of smoldering rubble pumped smoke into the air, but the water dispersed it and made everything smell fresh. Like a used up campfire, you know? I looked at your lifeless body once more and shook my head.

So, in the end, things didn't go the way that I had planned. You fought Walpurgis Night and when you died, your emotions were lost. That wasn't supposed to happen. It's too bad. You could've really helped the universe live longer.

You were supposed to lift your Grief Seed into the air and with one final shriek, channel all of your spirit, your vitality, your essence, through the seed and become a witch. You were to become Satan to the Christians, Shaitan to the Muslims, and Shiva to the Hindus. You were destined to be the Apocalypse, Armageddon, and the end of the world for the seven billion people on Earth. A girl I once formed a contract with became a witch and precipitated the bubonic plague, an even more powerful one precipitated World War II, but you were surpass all of them. You should have summoned the deluge that extinguished all life on Earth.

I suppose you expect me to apologize for condemning you to a meaningless death or something like. I won't. If you want to make an omelet, you have to crack a few eggs. You were a cracked egg, Madoka. I'm sorry it turned out this way, but I'm not sorry for trying.

Now, I find myself at an uncertain point in the story. I thought with the destruction of Earth, I would move on to another planet to harvest more souls, but I didn't consider the unpredictable events that transpired. This timeline may not be the prime timeline after all, but as Incubator, I have little choice but to continue my work on Earth.

IF YOU STILL DON'T SUPPORT what I do, then let me put things into perspective. The universe is a big place, bigger than you can possibly imagine. Stars form galaxies, galaxies for local clusters, and local clusters form superclusters. All of these things are millions of light-years away from each other. It's a terribly empty place, but it's also an exciting place. Life has independently arisen billions of times, and each form is more amazing than the next. Most of it is microscopic, but many life forms have made it past the single-cell stage and evolved into multi-cellular organisms. Even rarer are sentient beings capable of emotion and sociality. Rarer still are species that possess the ability to reason. Human beings are one of them, but others do exist. Oh, I could tell you about all of their cultures and languages, how they built great civilizations and created robust social systems, but I would have to sit here for a million years finish.

Instead, let me just tell you about us. Our species used to be much like yours. We didn't look a lot like you, but we had eyes, limbs, and ears at least. Evolution has a way of converging on the traits that matter the most. When our brains were still relatively undeveloped, we had already switched to sedentary lifestyles and founded cities. We warred with each other, we traded with each other, we produced art, and we pursued science. The same laws of nature that you discovered only recently, we discovered billions of years ago. The theory of evolution, the periodic table, relativity, quantum mechanics, and a bunch of other laws that you've yet to uncover. We wouldn't want to ruin the surprise for you.

We had emotions. When a family member died, we grieved. When another was born, we rejoiced. We avoided pain and sought pleasure regardless of whether our rationalities agreed with us. Our primal impulses ruled us for long time. We really were no different from you now. Once we completely analyzed our genome and perfected gene therapy, we were able to rid the genes that had been holding us back as a species. Through this mode of artificial evolution, and we promptly abandoned our emotions for rationality. Don't get us wrong; it doesn't mean we can't feel emotions, it just means that we don't let emotions get the better of us. So while I cannot empathize with you on a personal level, I_ can_ understand why you feel the way you do.

Armed with the gift of impeccable reasoning, in just a few years, we exhausted every scientific field. Biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics. We even figured out how to circumvent death. Every problem was resolved except the problem of entropy. It was a like watching an asteroid barreling towards us and there was nothing we could do about it. We wouldn't describe ourselves as scared, but we definitely did _not _want the heat death of the universe to occur so soon. At some point, we migrated from our home planet and ascended to the aether. I'm sorry, but I cannot elaborate on this point. The circumstances surrounding this event are fuzzy, and I couldn't tell you even if I wanted to. All we know is that somewhere along the way, a higher entity connected us to the flow of energy and entropy in the universe. We gained the power of telepathy as a result. This higher entity let us peer behind the curtains of nature; we realized that there were exceptions to the law of the conservation of energy. Energy _can _be created. Carrying our rationalities with us, we devoted ourselves to retarding the increase in entropy by injecting the universe with energy. We scoured trillions of planets for new sources of energy, and eventually, we happened upon the blue-green rock you call Earth. Human emotion, especially those of young girls, could provide enough energy for us to extend the life of the universe by several hundred billion years. You were a gold mine. Earth would eventually be destroyed, yes, but with your sacrifice, we could delay the heat death of the universe by many, many trillions of years. Think about this: if you knew the world was ending, would you be willing to sacrifice _us _to delay your demise?

You would, wouldn't you?

Now that you've heard my side of the story, I must thank you both for listening and for sacrificing yourself, even if you didn't mean to do it. Your emotions will improve the lives of countless organisms. Please don't be angry at me, Madoka! You'll see in time just how right I am.

I WAKE UP WITH a start. My head feels heavy with grogginess. I lean up from beneath the covers and rub my eyes.

"Where…"

A cool draft surges through the open window and pitches forth the blue bedside curtains. Past the glass wall, doctors and nurses talk with each other about something important. The sterility of the room looks awfully familiar. A thin file with "Mitakihara Junior High School Admittance Information" printed across the front lies on the stand beside me. Something is chafing at my chest, and I realize that I'm hooked up to a heart monitor behind the bed.

"I'm still in the hospital?"

But the world had just ended a few minutes ago, hadn't it? I remember a girl named Madoka Kaname and her dying pleas to me for help. It all seemed so real; I can still smell the rain. Was it all a bad dream?

I notice something warm and heavy in my hand. Carefully, I curl back my fingers, and a purple Soul Gem reveals itself. Patches of black dust are dancing inside of it.

"So it wasn't a dream?" I gasp.

I slip the gem in my pocket and sigh. What really happened back there? I glance at the calendar hanging on the far wall. The 16th has a red flower drawn over it; that's the day I I'll be discharged from the hospital. The 25th has a blue star drawn over it; that'll be my first day at Mitakihara Middle School. Today is the 15th, so I have ten days left before Incubator's plan is set in motion again.

A small sparrow lands on a tree branch just outside. It scratches itself and chirps a short song to me. Past the hospital gates, children are playing a game of tag, laughing as they go. Beyond that, a couple is walking hand-in-hand on the sidewalk and sharing a precious moment together. The clouds part and reveal the smiling mother sun.

To me, the universe is small and simple. I don't really care for entropy or thermodynamics or any of that complicated science stuff. The universe consists of only me and Madoka Kaname. I made a promise to her that I would protect her no matter what. That no matter how dire the situation, I will fight to the bitter end. And if that doesn't work out, I'll leap back in time and redo everything again until it does.

I don't care if that's irrational. After all, we humans are not flawless by any stretch of the imagination. We're a bunch of selfish, vindictive fools who'll fight each other over the smallest things. We want to live. We'll try our hardest to survive because we're emotional creatures. Oftentimes, these emotions get in the way of clear thinking, and we'll make bad decisions. We'll take things for granted, hurt our loved ones, and lose friends over trivialities, but that only makes true friendship all the more valuable. We are imperfect, yes, but we are perfect in our imperfection. We need each other to survive and thrive. We'll continue to make mistakes, but we'll learn from them and grow as both individuals and as a species. That is what it means to be human.

Ten days pass, and today is the first day of school and the second time I'll be meeting my friend. I wake up early to fix my hair and iron out my school uniform. I grab my bag and take the bus to Mitakihara Middle School. As I enter the classroom, I see the pink-haired girl's face, and I can't help but smile.

"Please introduce yourself," says the teacher.

"I'm Homura Akemi. Pleased to meet you!"

The teacher scribbles my name on the dry erase board. "Akemi was hospitalized for—"

I know I don't have much time, so there's no need for manners. I step forward and find my way to Madoka Kaname's desk. She looks up and gasps as I wrap my hands around hers. I feel complete again.

I hope I can keep my promise to her this time. If I fail, then I'll have to relive everything until I succeed. But that's not so bad because at least I can hold my friend's hands once more, look into her eyes, and say, "Madoka Kaname! My name is Homura Akemi! Let's work hard together from now on!"


End file.
